Throughout the first foreign trip of his second term in office, President Obama once again showed that he has learned from some of the mistakes he made during his first four years.
Back then he made a concerted effort to break the deadlock in the on-again off-again Palestinian-Israeli peace talks by using his first official visit to Egypt to deliver a highly anticipated speech to an audience that included Muslims around the world. In the course of his first election campaign he had promised he would deliver a major speech to Muslims from a Muslim capital during his first six months as president. To fulfil that pledge, he chose Cairo as the setting for this address, believing Egypt and its capital represented the heart of the Arab world.
While the latest speech he delivered to an enthusiastic crowd of 2,000 Israeli students was not as highly acclaimed as his 2009 effort, I thought it was a much better speech because it more accurately reflected the realities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Previously he’d attempted to raise the hopes of the Muslim world with his call for peace between the Israelis and their Palestinian neighbours, and a freeze on new Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Unfortunately, his appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy for Middle East peace never led to an Arab-Israeli version of the Good Friday Agreement that Mitchell had successfully negotiated in Northern Ireland a decade earlier. Nor did Obama’s public and private pressure on Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu lead the latter to become the first Likud political leader to embrace the concept of a sovereign Palestinian state.
What President Obama learned during his first term attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse was that his high-profile diplomatic approach put added pressure on Palestinian and Israeli political leaders that in turn led to resistance and defiance on both sides. So this time around, Obama decided to holster his guns and wade into the geographic and political centre of the conflict by meeting with and listening to what Palestinian and Israeli political leaders had to say on their home turf, in Israel and the West Bank.
Furthermore, instead of a high-profile speech addressed to Muslims around the world from a place outside of the conflict zone, President Obama chose to address a group of Israeli students in the heart of the contested capital of Jerusalem. By taking a more muted approach and directing his speech at the young people who will one day run Israel, Obama tacitly acknowledged the reality of the Middle East peace process. The reality is it will take years, not months, for people on both sides of this conflict to build the bridges of trust between them that are essential elements to any long-lasting peace.
During his visit to the West Bank, President Obama appealed to Palestinians to return to the bargaining table regardless of whether or not the Israelis stopped building new settlements. He argued that the peace negotiations should be focused on just two core issues: a sovereign state for Palestinians, and guarantees of peace and security for Israel citizens. But he also said: “That’s not to say settlements are not important. It is to say that if we solve those two problems, the settlement problem will be solved. So I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. I want to make sure that we are getting to the core issues and the substance.”
Later that evening, instead of telling Israelis that they should stop settlement construction as a precondition to resuming peace talks, President Obama pointed out how counterproductive new settlements were to forging a lasting peace agreement. He also noted how isolated Israel had become in the international community before arguing: “The only way to truly protect the Israeli people is through the absence of war, because no wall is high enough, and no ‘iron dome’ is strong enough, to stop every enemy from inflicting harm.”
President Obama also urged Israeli students and their parents to try to empathise with their Palestinian counterparts. “Put yourself in their shoes,” he implored, “look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day.”
He capped off his trip by using his influence to broker an end to the dispute between Israel and Turkey over the May 2010 Israeli raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara. Israel’s official apology for the deaths of Turkish activists in that raid not only led to a restoration of diplomatic relations between these two American allies, but also brought a moderate and democratic Muslim country back into the Middle East peace process.
So I am very encouraged by the initial actions and reactions of all the major players in the Middle East conflict to President Obama’s softer second-term Middle East diplomacy. But only time will tell if this more subtle ‘let’s hear from all parties involved’ diplomatic approach will lead to some real progress in the region.
Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in Public Policy and Political Economy. He previously lectured on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU from 2009-2011.
